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The New Bodleian Library in the historic center of Oxford had for years been so unfashionable as to be all but invisible. Designed in the mid-1930s by Sir Giles Gilbert Scott (1880–1960) in a stripped-down classical style, and not completed until 1946, it was already a throwback at a time when modernism was rising. Although its rough-textured golden-stone facades became blackened with dirt, and its entrance was always difficult to find, it was nonetheless well proportioned and detailed, sitting on a prominent one-acre corner site. It was just opposite two of this ancient university town’s architectural jewels: the 17th-century Sheldonian Theater by Christopher Wren and the early 18th-century Clarendon Building by Wren’s onetime assistant Nicholas Hawksmoor. Scott’s dowdier building deliberately did not attempt to compete with those masterworks. Yet now, after a $124 million upgrade by architects WilkinsonEyre, it has been turned into a cultural asset for the city. Reborn as the Weston Library, it dares to open up the flank facing its illustrious forbears and has at last become visible.